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Nigerian Civil War: Biafran Army Training Recruits As Civil War Intensifies | September 1968

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The Biafra Child - symbol of the Biafra famine

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The Biafra Child - symbol of the Biafra famine

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1970 - 1975

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6 July 1967 – 15 January 1970

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1961 - 1966

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Nigeria's civil war explained - BBC News

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At the end of the thirty-month war Biafra was a vast smoldering rubble. The head count at the end of the war was perhaps three million dead, which was approximately 20 percent of the entire population. This high proportion was mostly children. The cost in human lives made it one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history.

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It was a desperate time. Soldiers were being used by elements in power to commit a number of crimes against Igbo, Nigerian citizens. Military officers were rounding people up and  summarily  executing  them, particularly in the North, we were told by victims fleeing the pogroms.

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Those who knew Nigeria were not very surprised, because part of the way to respond to confusion in Nigeria is to blame those from the other ethnic group or the other side of the country. One found some ethnic or religious element supporting whatever one was trying to make sense of.

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The Nigeria-Biafra conflict created  a humanitarian  emergency of epic proportions. Million of civilians—grandparents, mothers, fathers, children, and soldiers alike—flooded the main highway arteriesbetween towns and villages fleeing the chaos and conflict.

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Food was short, meat was very short, and drugs were short. Thousands—no, millions by then—had been uprooted from their homes and brought into safer areas, but where they really had no relatives, no property; many of them lived in school buildings and camps. The Committee for Biafran Refugees, understandably overwhelmed, did what it could. I found it really quite amazing how much people were ready to give.

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A lot of this hot-blooded anger was fanned by British intellectuals and some radical Northern elements in places like Ahmadu Bello University.

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The story of the coup and how it happened started leaking out, first from the military barracks and then from the international media.

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There were many Biafran refugee camps dotting the landscape, from Enugu in the north to Owerri in the south, during the thirty-month conflict.

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"Biafra is more than a human tragedy. Its defeat, I believe, would rnark the end of African independence. Biafra was the first place I had been to in Africa where the Africans themselves were truly in charge."

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The post Nigeria-Biafra civil war era saw a "unified" Nigeria saddled with a greater and more [1]insidious reality. We were plagued by a homegrown enemy: the political ineptitude, mediocrity, indiscipline, ethnic bigotry, and corruption of the ruling class. Compounding the situation was the fact that Nigeria was now awash in oil-boom petrodollars, and to make matters even worse, the country's young, affable, military head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, ever so cocksure following his victory, proclaimed to the entire planet that Nigeria had more money than it knew what

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In the end, Biafra collapsed. We simply had to turn around and find a way to keep those people still there alive. It was a desperate situation, with so many children in need, kwashiorkor rampant, and thousands perishing every week.

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There were more and more reports of massacres, and not only in the North, but also in the West and in Lagos. People were hounded out of their homes, as we were in Lagos, and returned to the East.

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As we reached the brink of full-blown war it became clear to me that the chaos enveloping all of us in Nigeria was due to the incompetence of the Nigerian ruling class.

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As they approached the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation they saw the soldiers around but did not know what was happening. They were not scared, even though they found the commotion a bit peculiar.